SAS cubes are designed to offer efficient data storage,
fast data access, easy data maintenance, and flexibility in data management.
While cubes are the format of choice to guarantee fast query response
times against your data warehouse, SAS OLAP cubes are also often a
very space-efficient choice for data storage. In many cases, a basic
cube without additional aggregations can be smaller than the input
data because the process of creating the cube consolidates records.
SAS OLAP cubes use the hierarchy information for efficient aggregations
storage. SAS OLAP cubes also deal efficiently with data sparsity by
using virtual placeholders for empty cells. This removes the need
for any physical representation of empty cells. A good rule of thumb
is, the larger your input data, the greater the storage gain by loading
data into a cube.